by Kevin Keating
Not even seven in the morning and already the bisecting vapor trails of a hundred jets obscured the pale blue October sky like the crisscrossing telephone cables and the tangled grid of electric lines suspended above the parking lot, corralling her within this gilded pen like some mindless beast of burden and inspiring her, as it did every morning with ritualistic inevitability, to light her first cigarette of the day and take in a gratifying lungful of smoke, the one and only drag that tasted any damned good, the rest merely a form of habit and imprisonment like much else in life. The idea of ritual pleased her because it suggested something communal, an agreed upon set of beliefs, values, collective grievances, and it gave her great comfort to know that all across the country millions of addicts were simultaneously taking that first puff of the day with a fanaticism that was if not exactly religious then certainly sacramental.
The better part of an hour she sat there with the car idling. The fumes pouring from the tailpipe threatened to kill her once and for all, making quick work of what the cigarettes would take another decade or more to do, but at five minutes to eight, as students began to make their first appearance on campus, she forced herself to flick the smoldering butt of her third cigarette out the window. Only the middle of the month and some of them dressed as though they were on their way a drunken masquerade instead of class–a boy in a jester’s cap, a girl in blue tights and a flowing red cape, and in the distance a vaguely familiar figure with the pointed ears and mangy tail of a coyote. Buffoons one and all. She looked up. A flock of ugly black birds slid feverishly between the telephone lines, and she stared after them with a mixture of envy and loathing.
Quickly scanning the parking lot to see if anyone was observing her and feeling not unlike the femme fatale in the final scene of a film noir, she removed from deep inside the glove compartment, buried beneath the balled up tissues, a small .32 semi-automatic pistol with a white handle of polished ivory made from the tusks of African elephants harvested by poachers of unimaginable cruelty. A gun of devastating political incorrectness. What would her colleagues in the department say if they knew about it? Unlike them she was no idealist. She’d even written a letter to the editor of the college newspaper, arguing that professors be allowed to carry side arms–tenured faculty only of course. Adjuncts were clearly too inept, not to be trusted. Most of her colleagues laughed when they read this, thought she was being satirical. No one took her seriously. Only the man who sold her the gun showed her any deference. “Yes, madam,” he said with a smile that revealed a long history of dental neglect, “you’ve selected a very sleek weapon indeed. Short recoil, incredible accuracy.”
With a sigh of resignation she slipped the gun into the pocket of her trousers where it fit snug and cold against her thigh. It was just a short walk to Erie Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus. A plaque out front commemorated the historic stand taken by the heathen Indians who died in droves while trying to propel from their land and birthright the invading armies of Christian pioneers. Legend had it that their shamans and witchdoctors, skilled shapeshifters one and all, possessed the ability to transform themselves into coyotes and birds, but rather than turn tail and disappear in the hardwood forests, the holy men chose to meet their fate alongside the battle hungry warriors.
The great sandstone building erected on the spot of the infamous massacre paid them no homage at all–it looked rather like a protestant chapel and seemed always to smell of incense and candle wax–and because its small dirty windows faced west the building was entombed in darkness like a medieval cloister so that she had to fumble against the wall until she found the light switch. The sound of a hundred fluorescent lights buzzed like things alive, agitated, angry, seconds away from bursting the filament, showering her with white dust, choking her with a cloud of argon and mercury, stinging her with shards of glass. The hallway became a long tunnel of flickering pale blue light. Someone once told her that florescent lights caused certain people to have seizures. “Modernity afflicts us in the most unusual ways,” she commented.
But hers was a much more serious problem. For the past month she was greeted each morning not by some uncontrollable force that shoved her to the ground and made her foam at the mouth but by the strange spectacle of dozens–maybe an even hundred, who knows, she never counted them–World War II plastic army soldiers, military green men lobbing grenades, firing howitzers, hoisting bazookas on their shoulders, some crawling on their bellies, others shouting into walkie-talkies, all of them assembled just outside her door so that she had to tiptoe around them like Gulliver among a maniacal horde of Lilliputians. They looked as if they might storm her office, pillage her shelves, pin her to the floor and one by one commit vile acts upon her before filling her body with a million miniscule rounds of ammunition.
She’d never been the victim of a prank, at least not on a scale like this, and she felt somewhat unsettled by its sick immaturity, its rabid patriotism. Perhaps she’d made the mistake of being a little too political in class, of having said some disparaging things about war and genocide, the ridiculous myth of manifest destiny, upsetting the more unendurably ideological and reactionary students. “Mind you,” she told them as they doodled caricatures of her in their notebooks, “I do not consider myself un-American in any way.” More and more she believed in the sincerity of this statement. After all, there was the gun–what could be more American than that? What’s more she had a permit to carry the gun, even to conceal it on her person. She still believed in the law even if the rabble that sifted through the public education system and found its way into her classroom did not. She was also a staunch believer in self-reliance and cringed at the idea of calling campus security, those old men newly retired from the municipal police force who were better suited to devising clever speed traps than to dealing with an unstable and potentially dangerous eighteen-year old stalker.
With a broom and dustpan she swept up the army figures and tossed them into a trashcan. Then with her office door secured she studied her face in the mirror, made minor adjustments, brushed her hair again, applied another daub of makeup. At eight thirty she trudged into the classroom, trying to avoid the cool gaze of her students. They sat in a state of boredom akin to death, their arms folded, their eyes bloodshot and crusted over with sleep. To her they seemed not like human beings at all but strange ghosts and her classroom a sinking ship cargoed with petulant changelings. The school psychologists certainly had their work cut out for them. Well, so be it. She wasn’t naïve enough to believe that she could do anything to remedy the situation, and for the next fifty minutes she paced the classroom, reading from a composition textbook in a deliberate monotone.
Her specialty was Native American mythology and folklore, but the administration, after much “soul searching” as they put it, determined that because most of her students were primarily, and often exclusively, business finance majors there was no real need for classes that analyzed Iroquois creation stories. “Today’s students require practical writing courses,” said the dean, “refresher classes on grammar and mechanics.” It made little difference to her. Regardless of the topic, students paid no attention to anything she had to say. Their intellects had shriveled and turned to dust like old turds baked on the pavement under a blinding white sun and their interest in academics extended no further than looking for new ways to cheat their way to a C. Few succeeded. She had a knack for catching plagiarists, twenty years as an educator had sharpened her instincts, but one student had plagiarized so blatantly on his last writing assignment (his prose was more than merely refined, it was positively Nabokovian) that she found herself laughing at many passages and gave him an F but with an unprecedented opportunity to submit a revised version of the work. This was the bait, the lure.
He sat in the back of the classroom, the culprit, flanked on either side by two pretty girls who giggled at his crude jokes. She observed him closely, noting how like a child who pauses beside a flower garden to smell the roses he took in the cloying perfume of the two girls. Did they share the boy, she wondered, as they might share a smutty how-to manual, use him like some kind of sex toy? Their features were almost grotesque in their perfection. Like those Hollywood starlets who borrowed priceless jewels to attend awards ceremonies, these girls had a rare beauty on loan from Mother Nature who had a cruel habit of allowing objects of desire to become tarnished and dull over the slow course of time. With their heavy makeup and short skirts and shiny hair streaked with blonde highlights, they seemed oblivious to what lie in wait for them, like two porcelain dolls destined for the rubbish heap.
Suddenly she recalled how, as a child of six or seven, she’d been presented with the gift of two dolls from a foolish old aunt who had an almost visceral distaste for the books that her niece read. With a mock innocence that even then was not wholly convincing, she batted her eyes, murmured a quick thank you and then rushed up to her bedroom where, using a pair of scissors, a letter opener and a coat hanger, she methodically dissected each one, taking them apart not in some haphazard fashion, cruelly and stupidly as a boy would, but with genuine curiosity, piece by piece, thread by thread, to see how they’d been manufactured. So engrossed was she in her labors that she failed to notice her doddering old aunt who stumbled into her room without knocking and, seeing the neat piles of arms and legs on the floor and the coat hanger in her niece’s hand, ran down the hall with a sharp cry of horror. Years later, at some faculty lunch, she joked to an acquaintance (there was no one she felt comfortable calling a friend anymore) that “I probably looked like some back alley abortionist. Caught red handed. And by a religious zealot to boot.”
With a chuckle of contempt, one that she was clearly meant to hear, the girls sized her up and rolled their eyes. She ignored their antics, their yawns and sighs, battling her way through the rest of the lecture, and after class she stopped the boy before he could escape. The two twittering girls cast pitying glances in his direction and then left the building.
“You still haven’t turned in a new paper,” she said.
The boy slunk toward her desk. His shoulders were enormous and she took a step backward. “Yeah, well, my computer crashed last night.”
“Then I suggest you drop this class immediately. At this point you cannot possibly pass.”
“Uh, maybe I can turn the paper in tomorrow.”
“No, no, that won’t do.”
“But I need to keep this class or I won’t have enough credit hours to qualify for loans.”
She searched his eyes for that defiant glimmer of the psychotic, a flash of boiling and seething fury, a glimpse of the wild animal that thrashed around inside his skull and yearned to feast on her bones. Would he grab her by the throat, strangle her, toss her body beneath the floorboards, brick her up inside a wall? No, he wasn’t so imaginative as that. When it came death, Americans preferred their guns. Guns were simple. A quick bullet to the head and it was all over. No one had a sense of the romantic anymore, a flair for the exquisite details of murder. If he failed to intimidate her it was only because she saw behind the pinpoints of blackness in his arrogant, unwavering stare the horrible guilt that he harbored. Probably his pockets were stuffed with little toy soldiers. If only she could relieve him of this guilt, ease the burden of his pain. Her eyes wandered across his face, arms, chest. Too much time at the gym, not enough time at his desk. A child with no priorities and overactive genitals.
“Please, Professor. Give me another chance.”
“I gave you an opportunity and you chose not to take it.”
“But you can’t flunk me.”
“When I was an undergraduate, young man, my professors weren’t willing to make such accommodations, especially for those students caught cheating on their term papers. No, I had to submit my own work in a timely fashion or face harsh disciplinary action.”
Why was she bothering to tell him these things? She was beginning to sound like some confused spinster rattling off a string of clichés. There was a time–and not so long ago either–when just by lowering her voice and batting her eyes in a certain way she was able to manipulate these boys and have them do her bidding.
“Do you have a pen and paper?” she asked.
“Do I…uh, yeah, sure.”
“Hand them to me.”
He said something else but she couldn’t understand him. Always guttural murmurings from these boys. Why did they find it such a chore to enunciate the words in their limited monosyllabic vocabulary?
“Oh, quickly. Before I change my mind.”
He reached into his backpack and gave her his notebook.
She scribbled an address. “Bring the paper to my house this evening. I live out on the valley road. Have it to me by eight o’clock. Do you understand? Eight o’clock. No later.”
He nodded, and as he left the classroom and walked through the tunnel of ghostly light she noticed how he was unable to conceal a small smile of triumph.
-2-
Unlike her colleagues who enjoyed city living, she had no real desire to visit Severance Hall or the Museum of Art or those quaint corner cafés blazing with streetlights. Symphonic music, especially the unceasing bombast of Bruckner and Mahler, made her a little nauseous, and Impressionist seascapes with tiny gray men in wooden dinghies bobbing along pale waves of pink and gold bored her to death as did all of those ancient Greek serving bowls with unexpurgated depictions of pederasty between nubile boys glistening with oil and their erect wrestling coaches wearing only lecherous coyote grins.
Insipid conversations over a cup of espresso also failed to stimulate, especially since most of the small talk these days centered around which faculty members had been suddenly rushed off to the Cleveland Clinic because Death had dropped by for a characteristically unexpected visit, perhaps not with glimmering scythe and hooded robe, no, but with a sly “Boo!”, just enough put the fear of god into them, make them sink to the floor with a minor stroke and, despite a rapid recovery, leave them with a noticeable slump to their shoulders, an angry downward scowl to their mouths. The battalions of overpaid and self-important quacks at the Clinic knew their trade just well enough to keep Death temporarily at bay, oblivious to the fact that Death would wait good-naturedly for the inevitable, silently paring his talons and stoking the fires of hell in preparation for the multitudes who’d failed to seek redemption before the final hour.
Maybe her colleagues, by talking about the universal misery of illness and aging, by putting it into a broader context, hoped to ease her pain, keep her from dwelling on the events of the past two years, but if she made an effort to avoid them and their gloomy conversation it was because she sensed that beneath their pity and gentle words they still despised her and perhaps felt vindicated by her loss. Over they years she’d managed to alienate a number of them. To occasionally engage in lascivious behavior with undergraduates may have been forgivable, at least on some level, but to prey on the spouses of one’s colleagues? Well, that was an unpardonable offense and some kind of punishment had to be administered.
She chose self exile instead, retreating to the solitude of her home, a cottage of limestone and timber, built over a century ago by man who oversaw the work on the Erie Canal (an enterprise doomed to failure even before its completion), situated at the end of a dark lane on the cusp of a gentle slope overlooking the national park. All of the windows faced the sweeping expanse of valley that for fifty miles followed the crooked river between Cleveland and Akron. In the summer she smoked her cigarettes out on the patio and watched the birds roost in the trees–yellow warblers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, meadowlarks, brown thrashers–but she much preferred the sanctity of her den where with the precision of a pathologist she dissected the books on her shelf, unraveling the tangled threads of plots and themes, characters and symbols, one from the other until the books were a heap of nonsense piled up on the floor beside her desk, words without greater context, bled of their significance.
Tonight, however, she set her books aside, dimmed the lights, put on a little jazz, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, and while she waited for the boy to arrive she uncorked a bottle of a cabernet, quickly draining two glasses. At the last minute she remembered the gun and put it in a table drawer beside the couch.
Even as a married woman she had an insatiable craving that other women in the department didn’t seem to have (or at least never gave voice to) and one that her reserved and stoic husband never could fulfill. Philosophers made for inadequate lovers and so she sought pleasure in the occasional undergraduate who, she believed, had no epistemological reason for existing other than to make her squirm with pleasure. For the most part these boys were awkward and self-conscious, and she despised the hurried nature of their lovemaking, which was almost as uninspired as their writing. Most were a little too tidy, too polished, their lips too delicate, their hands too soft and white. She knew that despite their claims to be otherwise, these boys were not sexual absolutists–even the most heterosexual man was capable of buggery–and she feared they might be closeted homosexuals. Some clamped their eyes shut during the ordeal, and when it was over they seemed grateful. One boy even rolled toward the wall and whimpered softly in the darkness. This would never do. She required spontaneity, experimentation, dirty movies flickering on the television, lubes and gels and battery operated toys. Cheap and tawdry, that’s how she liked it. Dirty. Vile even. Crudeness turned her on, it always had, and what she needed now after a two-year hiatus of despair and mourning was a boy who cared only about life’s basest requirements–things like fine wine and fucking.
When she heard the knock at the door she straightened her dress and, taking one last look in the mirror, went to greet her guest.
“Are you alright?” she asked. “Is something wrong? You’re not ill, are you?”
He looked disheveled, out of breath. “I rode my bike. I don’t have a car.”
“You should have told me. It’s a long ride from campus.”
He shrugged and held the essay out to her.
“Come in. You must be exhausted. Sit down. Do you want something to drink? I’m having a little wine. Would you care for a glass? To restore your strength. Do you drink wine?”
“Not really. At communion sometimes.”
“You’re a Catholic?”
“Yeah.”
It was going to be a challenge to engage this boy in civilized conversation, but then conversation was not what she was interested in tonight.
“Women are forbidden to bless the wine, as you know, but the great books tell us that all intoxicants are beneficial to the soul–nectar of the gods, manna from heaven, nepenthe, opium. All have transformative powers. The Erie Indians who once lived in this valley brewed a tea made from mushrooms. They claimed the tea had magic properties and could turn men into coyotes. I ran across the recipe in a book of lore and decided to make a batch. As a kind of experiment you might say. It’s absolutely sublime. Maybe you’d like to try some?”
He shifted uncomfortably on the couch, glanced at his watch. She poured him a glass of cabernet and then went to the kitchen to uncork another bottle, a merlot, no sense wasting the good stuff. After an hour he opened up a little bit, confessed to greatly enjoying her class, told her how much he respected and admired her as an instructor, and after they’d finished that bottle of wine and then another she sat beside him on the couch and he did not inch away, and when she touched his face he did not begin to stammer or make excuses, and when she kissed him, unbuttoned his shirt, pulled down his zipper he did resist but gave himself over to her completely.
His lovemaking, at least initially, was cadaverous. With the exception of the rigor mortis that gradually set in below the waist he remained motionless, his legs dangling over the side of the couch, pants around his ankles. Even his face had the look of mute absence, but beneath that blankness she sensed a kind of pandemonium ruling over him, and as the moon’s white light filtered through the windows he became much more aggressive, pushing her face into a throw pillow with a little more force than she would have liked. Nevertheless, she found herself yielding to him and crying out, “Hurt me, oh hurt me!” Regrettably, as they both neared climax, he tarnished things by calling her by her first name. Despite the intimacy of these encounters she preferred to be addressed by her title, “Professor”, and after he’d stopped panting and heaving and collapsed glistening on top of her she made a point of correcting him on this matter in a voice that was at once stern and breathless.
For a long time they listened to the distant howl of coyotes in the valley. Over the past few months the animals had infiltrated the park from the forests of Appalachia and made forays to nearby farms to feast on sheep and chickens and the occasional cat or dog. Park rangers went through the trouble of warning residents to keep their pets indoors at night but their advice went unheeded and half dozen terriers met with a premature end. Piles of bones and blood-matted hides were all that remained. Overwhelmed with guilt, the owners took their sniveling children by the hand and placed simple stone markers in their backyards and bowed their heads in solemn prayer. From the window of her cluttered den she sometimes watched these rites, such as they were, crushing out her cigarette with a low cough of amusement.
Later that night, while sleeping fitfully in his arms, she was visited in her dreams by the ghost of her late husband. Maybe because he’d always been a stoic man whose passions were confined to and perhaps even restricted by his strange compulsion for reading books of the most obscure ontological arguments, he hovered above the scene of her latest conquest in grim silence–not even the vastness of eternity could alter the monumental edifice of his brooding demeanor–and with eyes hooded with indifference, much like the dark entrance to a cave, he observed his wife from a safe distance. He was a guarded man, as she well knew, very protective of the treasures deep inside the cave of his mind, but she had no light with which pierce the perilous path and was left with only a sad exterior, the gray pallor, the stooped shoulders, the outdated clothes–he’d never been one for style, wearing to class each day the same paisley ties and corduroy jacket, smoking the same ridiculous pipe, gazing out over his pupils with the same wounded eyes. Though he was just as incommunicative and neglectful toward her in death as in life, she felled compelled to embrace and comfort him, to profess her love, but as her fingertips grazed his face he vanished like jets of smoke that spiraled from the blackest depths of her lungs, and she found once more that she was entangled in the arms of the boy whose simian forehead was sprinkled with acne and whose eyes slowly opened and stared back at her with an expression that struck her as both stupid and sinister.
-3-
Mornings tended to be a bit awkward. There was nothing so foul as sunlight and sobriety and after she opened the blinds, some of the boys actually expected her to play the role of mother–doting, thoughtful, sexless–and were always shocked when instead of donning a robe and slippers and marching off to the kitchen to make them a hot breakfast of bacon and eggs she lit a cigarette and said, “Your clothes are on the floor, honey.” Normally, they had no idea what to say, but this morning the boy initiated the conversation.
“Do you mind if I stay here for a few days?” he asked as she dressed for work. He smoked one of her cigarettes, brazenly ashing on the floor.
“Stay here?” She glanced at the table by the couch. “Do you think that’s wise?”
He shrugged. “The frat house gets a little old after awhile. That place is a real shit hole, you know. I can never get away from all the goddamn noise. I need a break. Just a couple of days?”
“I don’t think that’s a very sensible thing for you to do.”
The clock chimed eight o’clock.
“We’re going to be late for class.”
“I guess.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Naw, I don’t think so.”
He was sitting on the couch in his underwear and she could make out the outline of his sex beneath the thin fabric.
“Fine. You can stay. But only for an hour or two. And please lock up before you go.”
She said the words but knew that he would still be there when she returned home. As she walked toward the door she made a point of tossing his essay in the garbage. Even to use it as kindling would be taboo. A man’s presence often lingered in a house long after he’d gone and sometimes it was best to erase all evidence of him.
The drive to work was an oddly pleasant one, and after parking beneath the telephone lines and extinguishing her cigarette, she walked over to Erie Hall, knowing all the while that things would be different today. Inside, a most auspicious sign awaited her–the hallway was empty, the toy soldiers gone. She felt a bit frazzled, wanted to check her hair and makeup one last time, but she was already five minutes late. Waiting in the classroom, glaring at their professor with barely contained fury sat the two girls in obscenely short plaid skirts, knee-highs and thin white blouses. Somehow they knew that their professor was behind the boy’s absence, but their anger gave her enormous pleasure, made her positively giddy, and she burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. The more diligent students buried their noses in their textbooks as if for protection but the girls snarled at her all the more. After she finished lecturing for the day spontaneity got the better of her and she walked across campus to the faculty lounge where she ate lunch with her colleagues who seemed more than a bit surprised by her presence. Most tried to avoid eye contact, others excused themselves altogether, but she stayed put and fought the temptation to brag about her latest peccadillo and to mock them for their comical self-absorption and impotence.
When she arrived home and saw the boy still sprawled across the couch, watching television and using one of her books as a coaster, she felt excited and annoyed and angry and nearly launched into a long-winded tirade about the inappropriateness of his conduct, the sheer audacity of his behavior–there were limitations to these sorts of things, rules, subtleties, didn’t he understand any of that?–but before she could point her finger toward the main highway and demand that he pedal away on his bicycle, the boy stood up and pinned her against the door and asked stonily, “So did you grade my paper yet, Professor?”
She sputtered, tried to think of some sharp reply, but then he laughed and lifted up her skirt and started tasting every inch of her with a mouth ravenous and eager and almost dangerous with its snapping jaws and gnashing teeth. She thought of screaming for help but believed to do so would be crazy–how would she explain the situation? He bent her over to the arm of the couch, his hands tearing away her blouse, clawing at her back, breathing against her shoulder blades with a crazed grin. She accepted the relentless driving rhythm of his punishment with yearning and humiliation; she shuddered with gratitude and disgust.
Afterward, the boy went to the bathroom where he showered and shaved. She listened to the water, to the drumming of her heart, and then she heard in the distance the sound of an approaching car. When he came back into the living room he was wearing a collared shirt, a paisley tie, a corduroy jacket. Like holy relics excavated from deep inside the earth and seen in a museum–part history, part dream–she recognized these things and knew their value.
“Where did you get those clothes?”
“Pretty funky, huh? I found them in the closet. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Yes, I do mind.”
“Well, I didn’t bring a change of clothes, you know, and I gotta look my best.”
“You look ridiculous.”
“Do you think so?” He seemed proud of the fact.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Some friends are coming to pick me up.” He glanced out the window. “Here they are.”
She sat up, pulled her legs up to her chin. “Who? Which friends?”
A car pulled into the driveway, blaring its a horn.
He reached into the pocket of the corduroy jacket and produced a pipe. “Hell, I should win first prize with this get up.”
Through clenched teeth she said, “You’re not going anywhere.”
He laughed and then went out the door. He walked across the gravel driveway, deliberately scuffing her husband’s penny loafers, and got into the car. The two girls whistled at him. “Hey, baby, you look hot.” Both were dressed in green army fatigues, their faces camouflaged with dark paint. Sexy soldiers waiting to be drilled by a tough taskmaster.
Naked, bruised, aching, she raced into the bedroom where she slipped into her robe and then she returned to the living room where she opened the drawer beside the couch and found the modern day totem for warding off evil spirits. She was being insensible, she understood that much, and as she marched toward the front door she realized that things would go much better for her if she would only return to the tranquility of her den, to her world of utterly impractical ideas, to the comforts of didacticism. The long years among her books had been a form of preparation for the alien loneliness that more and more had come to define her life. Books were all that remained, all she had left, stacks of them, new and old, and an endless supply of sharpened pencils with which to mark them up.
Outside, in the early evening gloom, she cringed at the sudden gust of icy October air and the uproarious squeal of the two girls who pointed at her, their faces turning red with laughter, tears streaming from their eyes. They remained, in spite their hysterics, as pretty as ever right up until the moment when she lifted the gun and with the glimmering barrel tapped three times on the passenger side window and demanded in a voice that was remote and professorial that the boy get the hell out of the car. Then their laughter gave way to high-pitched screams and their stunning features melted away like candle wax and became twisted masks of unadulterated terror.
Covering his head with both hands and sinking low in the seat in hopes of escaping death, the boy shouted, “You crazy bitch!” No hero, he was not about to fly to the rescue of these damsels in distress.
“Ohmygod!” the driver cried. “What do we do?”
“What do you want from us?” the other girl whimpered.
She wanted nothing from them, nothing at all, she only wanted to show them this, the future, and she twirled round and round like some grotesque dervish in a ritualistic danse macabre, allowing her robe to fly open up, revealing those things the sculptors and painters and Don Juans throughout the centuries had avoided or ignored altogether. But if this was a ritual it certainly was a poor one because ritual, so the scholars claimed, was the re-enactment of a myth, and all mythological thinking demanded that at some point blood be spilled, but bloodshed had never been her aim. No, it was enough just to hear those two bitches begging madly for their lives, and for a very long time she stood there letting the image soak into her brain. Then with the skill and confidence of a vigilante she coiled her finger around the trigger of the gun and fired into the air until the chamber was empty. All at once the sobbing and pleading ceased. Even the crickets stopped chirping as if waiting for permission to resume their plaintive melody. Bugs flitted in and out of the headlights. Then the engine revved, the car lurched violently forward, fishtailed in the gravel driveway, and finally barreled toward the main road. The smell of blue exhaust and gun smoke lingered.
It was nearly dark. She went back inside the house. In the back of her closet she found some jeans, a fleece jacket, an old pair of hiking boots. With flashlight in hand and cigarette clamped between her lips, she made her careful way along a narrow path behind the house that her husband had cleared with hatchet, rake and hoe and that was now overgrown with weeds and tall grass. The trail, where they once walked hand in hand, wound its way between heavy oaks and elms down to the valley floor where giant hogsweed and large clumps of sawtooth and big bluestem flowers grew through the summer and fall. Breathing in the smoky autumnal air she listened to the mournful voices of coyotes, animals skeletal and mangy and cunning, and she felt a hundred eyes glowing on the edge of the open field. They were not easily scared away by the alien lance of light and the crackling of leaves beneath her feet. Through a grove near the river they approached in silence. With frank curiosity, with loathing, with desperate hunger they observed her, tongues lolling.
She’d read the old stories, fragments of folktales from the Erie that those prudish and easily scandalized Christian settlers had either sanitized or tried to obliterate altogether, tales about the trickster Coyote who night and day obsessed over his painfully engorged penis and looked for opportunities to penetrate women, especially those nubile and slick skinned maidens who swam naked along the banks of rivers and streams. Always it was an older woman who interrupted Coyote’s good time, violently yanking his penis out of the maiden who, despite being taken by surprise, seemed to rather enjoy her victimization. But when the occasion–and his unrelenting desperation–called for it Coyote wasn’t beyond mounting even the older woman. While she slept in fits and starts, troubled by nightmares, he crept into her tent and, lapping at her shriveled paps, entered her with a low howl of unbridled merriment that lasted through the night.
In the deepening twilight she walked three times around the stump where a large maple once stood and where many years ago her husband, a little drunk from the flask he always brought along with him, had carved their initials. Through the clattering branches she gazed up at the stars and thought how the ancients revealed too much about life. Those shamans of old, reeling from their potions, trembling with animal spirits, performed their ghost dance in a desperate attempt to regain all they’d lost over the years, but when they looked deep into the evening fires they saw hovering in the crackling and hissing embers visions and phantasms that did not bode well for the future of their people.
“In the morning,” said the shamans, “the woman wakes up with a feeling of great warmth and contentment but believes the whole thing to have been dream. She believes this, yes, but for many days she can think of nothing else but Coyote, and each night before falling asleep she leaves prizes of strangled hens and geese outside her tent, hoping to lure him back to her bed. The weeks and months and years go by but Coyote never returns. And the woman finally vanishes into the austerity and solitude of old age without ever again experiencing the pleasures of youth.”
